Tuesday’s Keynote

Steve Jobs’ Macworld Expo keynote kicks off this morning. People have been lining up since 4am. We’ll have the details on Call for Help as soon as Steve stops talking.

Happy birthday, Mr. Bean. Rowan Atkinson is 49. Pan Am’s Pacific Clipper completed the first around the world flight on this day in 1942. Gibson patented the flying V guitar in 1958. Schoolhouse Rock debuted in 1973 with “Multiplication Rock.” (hum along now)

Bloomberg says the Google IPO is on track for April. This is the one everyone’s waiting for – the 21st century equivalent of 1995’s Netscape offering. The company is expected to be valued at somewhere between $4 and 10 billion.

Microsoft afraid of Linux? You bet. With another couple of years yet before the next version of Windows the company seems a little worried about inroads Linux might make into its desktop market. Perhaps that explains the new “fact based” ad campaign that says Windows costs less to run than Linux.

If you weren’t one of them, here’s your reward. Dell has announced 0% financing on its consumer electronics for 12 months on purchases over $500.

One thing you won’t see at CES this year: the Microsoft Smart Display. Launched at last year’s show inside a house custom built in the parking lot at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Wi-Fi enabled tablet never took off and according to c|net, Microsoft is dumping the product.

Microsoft is expected to launch an iPod killer, the Portable Media Center, at CES. I’ll take a look this weekend on the radio show. Will Steve launch a preemptive attack today at Macworld?

SCO sent out 6,000 letters last week asking companies that use Linux to “prove” that there’s no infringing UNIX code in there. Novell is fighting back by filing for copyright on much of SCO’s code saying SCO has failed to meet conditions required by the transfer of rights back in 1996. SCO says Novell’s filings are fraudulent. Ooo. Penguin fight!

Tivo says the DISH DVR infringes its patents. The company is suing EchoStar.

DVD Jon has followed his death defying act in the Norwegian courts with a new hack that allows anyone to play protected iTunes Music Store songs using VideoLAN. “We’re about to find out what Apple really thinks about Fair Use,” says the plucky Scandinavian hacker.

Saw the MacWorld keynote today. iPod-mini is pretty spiffy, with 4 gigs of what appears to be solid-state storage onboard! The pricing is out of whack though. Not specifically because it’s more expensive than other flash players – Steve J. was right when he said that the higher-end flash players it competes against can creep upwards of $200 US. For $50 more, you get 16x the storage. That’s not a bad deal.
Where the problem lies is in the iPod-mini’s cost proximity to the low-end “true” iPod. The mini retails for $249 and gives you 4 gigs of storage. For $299, I can buy a full-fledged iPod with 15 *gigs* of storage. So, I think the mini is going to have to drop in price quickly in order for it to sell well. I have a feeling they’ll be selling a lot more 15 gig iPods instead (not that that’s a bad thing).
– Mike K
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Is your Macfoo strong?http://www.macfoo.org – free blogs for Mac fanatics.

As soon as I heard the 4GB mini was going to be 50$ less than the 15, two things ran through my mind. Either they’re not going to sell any of them until they drop the price to 199, or they’re about to hike the prices on the regular iPods. Hopefully it’ll be the former. Just out of curiosity, when did the smallest iPods go up to 15GB? I thought they were just 10.

Anyone in their mid-20s or younger does not remember an internet not utterly dominated by today’s giant digital platforms. After all, the idea of having a full, unencumbered internet experience without ever needing a Google or Facebook account is pretty much inconceivable now. All ecommerce roads eventually lead back to Amazon. All your online activity […]

A former Nasa engineer spent six months building a glitter bomb trap to trick thieves after some parcels were stolen from his doorstep. The device, hidden in an Apple Homepod box, used four smartphones, a circuit board and 1lb (453g) of glitter.

In a blog post Monday, Google said it would lease a large office building at 550 Washington St. in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood and make it the centerpiece of its new 1.7 million-square-foot Hudson Square Campus. Google plans to invest $1 billion in capital improvements to the campus, which will also include two nearby buildings […]

France said at the start of December it would start taxing Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, the big US technology companies known as GAFA, if European Union finance ministers failed to agree on a bloc-wide digital tax next year.

Charter Communications, the parent company of Spectrum, has agreed to a $174.2 million settlement with Attorney General Barbara Underwood, following the 2017 lawsuit that saw the AG’s office sue the internet provider over misleading internet speeds. The lawsuit, led by then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman alleged that speeds were up to 80 percent slower than advertised.